The secret of peanut butter

I love to eat it. Love to use it in cooking. Add a tsp – tbsp of it to chicken gravy, throw in 1/4 tsp of almond extract and it turns into a delicious almond gravy sauce.
Know what it’s also good for?

Removing fly trap glue from your skin. Or, in this case, bird feathers. Probably could work for human and dog hair too.

Third time I’ve gone through this. Two of which were my birds, one was a wild chickadee.

We use fly traps (the dollar store strip kind) to catch these small moths in our house. Years back my mom brought home some clothes from a garage sale or church sale. Can’t remember which. But they brought with them these moths called casing moths (if I remember correctly). They are very tiny, but nearly impossible to get rid of completely. In warmth they multiply. They used to be worse before we implemented the fly strips.

Funniest thing is we’d used plenty of “moth traps” for their particular type. Nope. Dollar store fly strips worked perfect.

Just not for birds.

My parakeet Zeva had gone into my mom’s room once and got a wing caught. (My parakeets are not kept in a cage except at night or in necessary situations, otherwise they can fly freely through the house. Though they stick to my room generally.) Not too serious but that is how I first learned this trick.

Today Khaleesi managed to find the one fly strip I had buried deep in my closet. She got spooked by me moving her cage and somehow veered off course. I noticed her missing from her branches on the wall and discovered her wrapped up in the fly strip on the ground. Not even sure how she got it off the wall.

I carefully removed her from the strip then grabbed the peanut butter. She was enthused, trust me. Since she got the fly strip glue all over her, guess where she got peanut butter? Uh hunh. Everywhere but her head got a thick rubdown (didn’t wanna risk it). I rubbed a tiny bit of pb on her head, but not much.

See the peanut butter adheres to the glue. And then you can wash off the peanut butter. You can’t wash the glue off.

Make sure to really rub the peanut butter in.

Then it was just a matter of cleaning the peanut butter off. Dawn is probably best, but shampoo is also all right. But because she’s a bird, it’s super important to rinse well. Likeacat, a bird will clean itself. So it’s important to ensure everything is rinsed. Even peanut butter can gum up the parakeets mouth in large doses.

To rinse her I used lukewarm water. Not only did she lose feathers, but parakeet bodies are fairly delicate so the temperature has to be regulated. Same with holding a bird. It’d be very easy to crush one’s body or wings.

This is how she ended up after. She was so worn out she kept falling asleep, lol. She’s never really been handled much so it’s good that she was even as calm as she was.

After 30 minutes or so of her own cleaning once I let her out of her cocoon.

She’s even drier now. I’m grateful that she wasn’t hurt worse – could’ve broken a wing. I’m still surprised she managed to hit that fly strip. It was so deep in my closet she shouldn’t have gotten anywhere near it. Random fluke.

Other than a freaky moment, she’ll be fine. Lost a few feathers but when she molts soon, they’ll be replaced.

So if you find yourself with fly strip glue on you or a pet, you’ll know what to grab.